Prevent Firefox Slowing Down your System: Reduce Memory Hogging

No matter how good chrome gets, Firefox will still be the no.1 choice for more geeky web users. But one thing which Firefox still has issues with is memory hogging. After surfing for some time you might notice your whole system slowing down due to the increased usage of cpu memory.

Avoid Memory Hogging by Restarting Firefox After Exceeding RAM Limit

Here is a simple way to prevent memory hogging in Firefox.

# Memory Restart Add-on : Link

Memory Restart will let Firefox users will see the browser’s memory usage in the status bar. Once memory usage reaches a certain threshold, the status bar text display will turn red, and the user can click on the status bar to quickly restart Firefox.

The memory threshold is configurable, so the user determines how much memory Firefox can consume before it needs a restart. The default is 500Mb. When used with the Firefox option "Show my windows and tabs from last time", this allows you to quickly restart Firefox and fix any memory consumption issues, without losing your existing tabs.

Get Back System Memory When Firefox is Minimized

Windows has an useful feature by which it can grab memory back from applications, programs that are minimized, but Firefox prevents that and so it keeps all the memory to itself after getting minimized, but unless you enable this tweak.
1) Type about:config into your Firefox address bar and hit Enter.
2) Right-Click on anywhere on the window and choose New > Boolean

3) On the window that pops up, enter config.trim_on_minimize and click OK.

4) Select true in the final dialog box and restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.
From now on every time you minimize Firefox window, windows will try to recover some of the memory space hogged by Firefox and put them into the application that are active.